Customer Reviews

Geomorphology: A Systematic Analysis of Late Cenozoic Landforms

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I have read many well written and well organized texts about geology, this is not one of them. The language is so dry, and information is scattered.

To preface this review, I'm a grad student in civil engineering (specializing in hydrology) and did not take any geology courses previous to graduate geomorphology. Although the course wasn't required, I took it to get a more qualitative perspective of open channel flow, erosion and sediment transport, et cetera (god knows I received the quantitative side in engineering!). Now, onto Bloom's text / the one that was used for the geomorph class:

Where to start? First, the text is incredibly verbose / not concise. Sure, geology is a descriptive science and geologists love their geology terms (just as engineers love to abuse PDEs and empirical equations), but this text is taken to the extreme. The introductions to chapters are nauseating and almost sound like a narrative. So verbose. In contrast, sections where governing equations and graphical methods are presented are not covered in any useful amount of detail (see 'The Fluvial Geomorphic System' chapter).

Given my background, my lack of geology vocabulary obviously played a part in the frustration; however, it still seems as if the author wanted to stroke his ego. At least I could use the index to look up all these foreign terms. Right? Wrong. The index is far from being useful- it's not even remotely comprehensive and leaves out (what I would say) many of the key terms. Actually, if one is to read Bloom's preface on Page XI, he states that "There is no glossary in this book. I prefer students to learn technical terms in context, so terms are set in boldface and defined at their first use." Thanks for that, Arthur. Your rubbish justification doesn't make the index / glossary any more useful, friend.

Honestly, I would deem this book 'borderline unreadable'. Ultimately, I ended up using online resources to support my learning process in the class; the book was absolutely worthless. I cannot attribute my 'A' in the course or ANY of my understanding of basic geomorph concepts to reading this book. If circumstances allow, I'd avoid this one like the plague!

I am a geology student and I did not find this book sensitive to that. Every sentence packed into this book (there are a lot) was important. There was no glossary, chapter review, chapter objectives, or any user friendly thing to help a student really learn the subject. I do not recommend this book unless you already are a geomorphologist, then it may not be so terrible.

It is an excellent textbook, can be used in different ways, to meet the students need. Recomend the textbook, will be using it this fall.